Our Other Excuse

The other reason we've been so distracted from our blogging obligations of late is that Cara is pregnant! (Fair warning to our faithful readers: we expect that this blog will contain a lot more baby stuff than it has in the past.)

As many of you already knew, this happy event is something we had been working toward and, with the help of a book titled Taking Charge of Your Fertility, a lot of the doubt and randomness typically associated with starting a family didn't plague us so much. Now we've moved on to try digesting the wealth of information available on pregnancy and baby-raising. For those of you with favorite references to recommend, we'd love to hear about them!

Because we've already had a few days on our own to digest this news before announcing it on the blog, we've also had time to anticipate some of your questions. In no particular order, then, are some of our answers:

1. The due date is July 31, 2007.
2. The venue for the arrival of ShamrockJewBaby is Beijing, China.
3. The medical facility of choice is Beijing United Family Hospital, a nearby medical facility run by an American who founded the hospital after discovering that Beijing didn't have modern facilities for delivering children. Check out her story here, it's a good one.
4. The baby will not be eligible for Chinese citizenship. Our baby will be American, and will be entitled to its very own diplomatic passport.
5. We do not know when we will next be in the United States.
6. We opted to announce the pregnancy at this early stage because we saw no reason to wait until after all the major miscarriage hurdles have been crossed. Miscarriage is a common reality of pregancy and, while we desperately hope to make it to term, we do not believe we would be best served by keeping all our friends and family in the dark about such a major event should the worst come to pass.

Getting a little busy

You may have noticed that our blog postings have slowed a little bit. We have a number of excuses for this. Today we will discuss excuse number 1 - MBA. That' s right. Cara has signed up for an Executive Masters of Business Administration program here in Beijing. It is run by the University of Maryland who actually sends professors out here once a month for 4 10-hour days of intense learning. The first class is next week, so this week Cara has been busy getting ready (and completing her application). The program is suppose to finish up about a month before we leave China. Great timing.

The downside is that since Cara is our primary blogger, having her distracted has had a noticeable impact on our posts. This will likely become some useful supply/demand model that she can use in her class.

Can you hear me now?

This photo (with blue tint added to the sky for the sake of contrast; in reality it was a slate gray sky and pretty monotonous to look at, so please forgive our diddling with reality) was intended to capture the prolific display of television aerials scattered across this Beijing housing community. Note the cluster of satellite dishes toward the right-hand side of the photo. We're guessing cable TV hasn't arrived to this part of town yet. Although many parts of Beijing look as modern as any city in America, walking through neighborhoods where the "middle class" lives makes it clear that there is a LOT of basic infrastructure that we Americans take for granted (such as bathrooms in one's own home; the residents of the neighborhood pictured here must use public toilets).

Kitty Monday and Quinn! (updated)

We know we missed kitty Friday, but since its Matt's birthday (well, tomorrow) and he put in the original request for kitty updates, we decided to go with Kitty Monday!

You may recall that one of our guests was 2 year old Quinn. Well, Quinn likes those cool interactive toys and made very nice with Cyrano. For our part, we were relieved to see that Cyrano also played nice with Quinn.


In a related note, Quinn's mom Sarah brought the pecan and pumpkin pies. (Also good for breakfast!)

Our other delicious desserts included

• Two chocolate cakes with a banana pudding frosting courtesy of Natalie
• A nut bread from Bec
• Berry flavored and chocolate flavored homemade ice cream from Josh

You were right Niki, we can talk about the desserts and the kitties :)

We received some notes that the video was not working. We think this is fixed now.

Traditional Thanksgiving Samosas

In case you were not able to figure it out from the title, we are going with Thanksgiving menu for today's posting.

Now, it maybe that you have never heard of an Indian flavored Thanksgiving meals, but just talk to Michael and he can tell you all about it :)
(Before continuing we wish to clear up a possible mix up that might exist in your mind. Indian, as used in this blog refers to the food from the country of India and not to Native American cuisine, although the second option does seem appropriate for this holiday.)

So the run down:
Appetizers - nuts in their shells and fruits which included:

• Roasted walnuts still in the shell - a startling delicious option that we bought purely by accident. If you have never had roasted walnut you should try them.
• Hazelnuts - adequate but not be a repeat performer next year
• Pistachios - a sure winner everywhere you go
• Longans - a fruit with a tough outer skin that makes them look like a nut. They are about the size of a large red grape and have a gelatinous pale flesh around a hard stone. Very fun
• Dried hawthorn bits
• Dried figs - mmmmm

Meal

• Fresh baked bread (of course)
• Middle Eastern Squash and Couscous Soup which we made with pumpkins, rice, and lotus roots (which stay crunchy even in soup) - thanks Pam!
• A HUGE turkey - We ordered a 14 pound bird but the folks at the embassy food locker who brought in turkeys apparently decided that bigger is better and we ended up with something around 22 lbs. It was by shear force of will and extraordinary use of his amazing mental powers that Michael was able to squeeze the thing into the oven. The fact that it actually came out tasty was simply astounding.
• Turkey gravy in a real gravy boat!
• Hawthorn chutney because you can not get cranberries in Beijing. Just in case you were thinking of trying it, it turns out that jujubes do not work in chutneys at all which was surprising since they make such a popular candy!
• Ganbian sijidou (Dry-fried Green Beans) - This is actually a Chinese dish, but its one of our favorites though we had Li Ayi make the none pork option.
• Palak with egg tofu - Li Ayi pointed out to Michael that this dish is usually made with a very soft cheese called paneer. But paneer is hard to come by so we asked her to make it with the tofu instead. She said that was okay since some Indian people like it that way also. Phew, close call.
• Samosas - after all, they have potatoes in them :)
• Mango chutney - cause you need it for the samosas
• Mashed potatoes (from Chip and Sarah because otherwise it just would not be Thanksgiving)
• Sweet potatoes with a brown sugar/apple crusty topping because Josh could not find marshmallows to put on top (Josh's comment about why we needed this dish was surprisingly similar to Chip and Sarah's comment above.)
• Salad with those fresh greens from those monks. We also added some feta cheese which is a treat.

Dessert - well, there is a lot more to add to this, so desserts will just have to wait for another day. We can tell you that they were good enough that we both had double servings of pie today :)

Mmmm... Tryptophan*

Happy Thanksgiving Day!
The cast starting at the bottom left of the table
(and we have included how we met them)
Cara is taking the photo
Michael
Quinn (work)
Sarah (work)
Adam (Natalie's friend)
Natalie (synagogue)
Jonathon (synagogue)
Philip (Frank's friend)
Sean (Natalie's friend)
Bec (synagogue)
Frank (work)
Chip (work)
Kim (work)
Josh (work)

Tomorrow - The menu!
(or maybe silly kitties - we'll have to see)



*tryptophan 

Is that really necessary?

When Ben was staying at his hotel in Beijing, this one of the things he found in his closet. It was about the size of a shoe box.

Doesn't exactly give you a warm fuzzy does it? 

Let me take care of that child for you

We have mentioned before about how complete strangers will help care for small children, whether or not you want them to. Well, when we were out for dinner the other night, we were able to acquire proof of this phenomenon. Our group was comprised of 5 adults and one small 2-year-old child. We managed to hold the wait staff at bay until about 3/4 through the meal when the little guy was trying desperately to get out of his seat and we did not attend him quickly enough. One of waitresses saw the opening in our line of defense and moved in. She quickly had Quinn (the little guy) distracted by talking to him and washing his hands. (Check out the first picture.)
Then she helped him out of his seat and took him over to the stage where the night’s show had not yet started and encouraged him to not only run around, but maybe try to use the sound equipment. We were not so sure this was a great idea, but hey – who were we to stop her?

Eventually she got called away (maybe to wait on one of her tables) but that was okay, because the rest of the wait staff was happy to pick up where she left out. You can see the waitress in the last picture is not the same one as the woman in the first 3 pictures.

What we didn't get, was a picture of the 6 men at the table next to us who tried to play with Quinn all through their meal. This was particularly shocking as Quinn was being a little fussy and yet every time he made a loud noise, the men would try tickling his feet or hands or otherwise distracting him. They were quite enthralled as opposed to a similar situation in the States where they would have shot us dirty looks and made snide comments under their breath.

This is definitely a culture that values community! 

Chinese chopper copies a clone

So here's the odd progression from American iron to the streets of Beijing: Harley-Davidson made bank on a motorcycle image, and then Honda copied the basic design and named it the "American Classic Edition" of the Honda Shadow. Now, some Chinese company has decided to copy the copy of the original, as their version even mimicks Honda's gas tank logo. Too funny. Note that the Chinese motorcycle, however, only has one cylinder. We're not sure why it is, but the vast majority of motorcycles in Beijing only have one cylinder. Those that have two cylinders are typically lugging a sidecar and are therefore three-wheeled vehicles. We suspect that this might be a regulation of some kind, though we've seen at least four tricked-out Harleys (with full V-twin motors) here in town, so if there's a rule, there's also an exception (or four).

Guests at the Airport - Also called Bye Bye Ben

Despite our best efforts, Ben did make it to the airport today and headed back to the states.

It is just as well too, because it turned out that we were slowly killing him through the devious and difficult to thwart method of cat. That's right, Ben was very, very allergic to our dear kitties. The kitties were most apologetic for causing such a reaction and constantly tried to make it up to Ben by following him around the house and trying to climb into his lap at every possible opportunity.

While we don't have a picture of the kitties stalking Ben, we do have this video clip of the kitties. We wanted to show you the kitties in action, so we were trying to catch them chasing after the hair elastics they love so much. That didn't work so well, but before we could turn off the camera, Cyrano randomly went into action. Crazy spaz cat.

We tried to imbed the clip into this blog below but if that doesn't work, you can find the clip here.